Noted

ON a recent evening, an unusual experiment took place at a lounge in downtown Manhattan. Nine blindfolded women were asked to determine, by smell alone, whether any among a group of nine men was worth pursuing. (The New York Times)

(Hope that she wasn't here...)

The Cooper Square Hotel "doesn’t just stick out among the nearby tenements but more or less taunts them"

In the Times today. From Frank Bruni's review of Table 8 at the Cooper Square Hotel:

It’s the Cooper Square Hotel, a whimsical glass sliver that doesn’t just stick out among the nearby tenements but more or less taunts them, declaring them holdovers from a frumpier East Village past. The hotel tries to claim the neighborhood around it as a party zone on a homogenously slick, glossy par with South Beach or West Hollywood.

Not all the neighbors are amused. Some have responded to the din of chatter and generic lounge music coming from the hotel’s second-floor terrace by hanging dirty briefs and the like from a clothesline readily visible to the revelers. It’s a campaign of undermining by underwear.

I spotted only one sad, fluttering garment on the evening when I ate on Table 8’s street-level patio. And it did less to ruffle my serenity — the patio is a pretty, breezy treat — than the door that crashed into the back of my chair when someone decided to step outside. Placing a table for diners smack in the door’s way exemplifies the curious planning at which Table 8 excels.

And the sound level inside Table 8? "absolutely bonkers" and "excruciating."

And make sure to read the part about the wine in the restrooms.

Noted

"Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses." (The New York Times)

The Times on why NYC corporate law firms are becoming an endangered species

"As the apocalypse on Wall Street ripples out into the larger economy, a thick red tide is lapping at the once-impregnable foundations of New York’s corporate law firms, threatening to turn the industry — and with it, some iconic city characters — into an endangered species." (The New York Times)

"No place stays the same for 15 years, certainly not in Manhattan"

Jim Dwyer writes about Surma Books & Music on Seventh Street near Cooper Square in the Times today. An excerpt:

When Myron Surmach moved from shopkeeping to beekeeping in the 1950s, he turned the store over to his son, Myron Jr., who had a fine run as impresario of Ukrainian dances and parties and outfitting the flower children of the 1960s. Peasant blouses were in demand. Janis Joplin and Joan Baez and members of the Mamas and the Papas shopped in Surma Books & Music.

The grandson, Markina Surmach, whose first language was Ukrainian, lived above the store until he was 6. He left Little Ukraine and New York behind in 1991. “You want to define yourself, apart from the mold,” he said. “I chose to run away.” He started a Web-development business in Denver.

Surmach the beekeeper and store founder died in 1991, not quite 99 years old. His son died in 2003, at age 71. Markina has a sister, who was busy raising her children.

“If I didn’t come back, the store was going to close,” he said.

No place stays the same for 15 years, certainly not in Manhattan. With a few exceptions, Ukrainians have long since drained from the Lower East Side. So have the artists living cheaply. “The homogenization of city life is not unique to New York, or this country,” Mr. Surmach said. “It’s all over the world.”

[Image via]

Holy rollers

"During the peak of the real estate boom, one of New York’s largest landowners unloaded more than $100 million worth of property — and might have sold more if not for the parishioners who clung to their churches and blocked the bulldozers. The seller was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which closed more than two dozen houses of worship and schools between 2003 and 2008." (The New York Times)

The day the classical music died

The cash-strapped New York Times may sell its classical radio station, WQXR (96.3), which it has owned since 1944. According to Page Six: "One interested party might be ESPN, which is said to want an FM outlet for its WEPN (1050 AM) sports programming, which includes Knick, Jet and Ranger games but can't be heard clearly in parts of the metro area."

Side note to the story:

"Several months ago, ESPN was reported to have talked with Emmis Communications about leasing low-rated rock station WRXP (101.9 FM), although no deal was made."

Stories from the Times today that I didn't get around to reading

Donkey Ball Stubbornly Holds On Despite Criticism

[Photo: Jodi Hilton for The New York Times]

"A thousand crisscrossing fictions"

"Picture Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller 'North by Northwest' being hustled out of the hotel and into the back seat of a parked car by two goons, having been mistaken for another man. 'Don’t tell me where we’re going,' Grant quips. 'Surprise me.' The car peels away and we are swiftly sealed in another world, our familiar surroundings receding in the rear-view mirror.

"Standing at the same corner half a century later, it’s not hard to feel a curious dissonance between the two places. There’s the tangible New York of concrete and smog, and there’s what the film historian James Sanders has called the 'mythic New York,' the dreamy celluloid landscape of a thousand crisscrossing fictions."

(The New York Times)

A "showcase" on East Seventh Street

The Beth Hamedrash Hagadol Anshe Ungarn East Seventh Street, described as "a Beaux Arts synagogue built in 1908 for a congregation of Hungarian Jews," was designated a historic landmark last March.

It was split into five residences in the 1980s. Today, the Times features the folks who live in the building's penthouse.

Notes the article, titled "Once Sacred, Now Their Showcase:"

Until pull-down shades were recently installed, neighbors in the tenement walkups and condominiums across East Seventh Street were afforded unobstructed glimpses of the couple’s king-size platform bed, egg-shaped bathtub and clear-glass shower. The blinds might be optional this summer, as the stands of black bamboo that ring the cedar-lined terrace reach full growth, blocking out any Peeping Toms.

[Photo: Michael Falco for The New York Times]

For anyone who has ever wanted to spend the day with Barbara Corcoran

Yesterday, of course, was Barbara Corcoran's 60th birthday. (Hope that you remembered to buy some property!) Anyway, quite by accident, I stumbled upon a Corcoran feature in the Times from March 5, 2000, titled What Do You Do All Day?

Let's take a look, shall we!

Wednesday, Jan. 19

6:00 a.m. Lana Zinger, Russian-born personal trainer, arrives for morning workout.

6:30 Tommy, 6, watches his mother work out. Between crunches, requests reading from "Harry Potter." Request denied.

7:00 Makeup artist arrives.

7:15 Dresses (brown Christian Lacroix suit with Herms scarf).

7:45 Takes Tommy to school in cab. It is absolutely freezing.

8:10 Arrives at Tavern on the Green to give speech at her company's awards breakfast.

8:15 Talks janitor into letting her practice her speech in a broom closet.

8:55 Emerges feeling confident, but "like Aunt Clara on 'Bewitched' -- dusty and smelling of Lysol."

9:00 At podium in front of 500 sales agents, clinks glass to get attention. Glass breaks.

Boring!

1:00 Sharon Baum walks in dressed in fur-trimmed suit with faux-diamond "Sold" pin. Corcoran says, "Boy, if you're not rich you certainly look it." Departs in Baum's Rolls-Royce for lunch at the Lobster Club. Shares creamed spinach, biscuits, French fries with Baum. Discusses whether the market will survive if the dot-com companies take a hit, how even Wall Streeters with millions in cash can't find apartments.

2:45 Departs restaurant. Gets call from office saying that the seller of the nine-room Park Avenue apartment she's been wanting to buy for herself finally wants to make a deal. Phones from car. ("I'm so nervous, I have to stop thinking like a sweaty-palmed buyer and start thinking like a broker.") Strategizes with Baum about how to be the winning bidder. Baum tells her to get as much information as she can about the family. Makes the call to the Park Avenue seller. "Oh, God, I got disconnected. Does anyone else have a cell phone?" Everyone in the car has a cell phone, including the driver. Still can't get through. Is now very hyper. Stays in the car and keeps trying while Baum looks at multimillion-dollar "maisonette" on upper Fifth Avenue.

4:00 Driver drops Corcoran off at gym, where she meets Becky Wood, Tommy's nanny, and watches Tommy swim.

The Times looks at Webster Hall's past and present (and future)

The $3 million, yearlong renovation at Webster Hall is done. And the Times takes a look at the 11th Street club's history....

Charles Goldstein, a cigarmaker, built Webster Hall in 1886 for $75,000, with a design by Charles Rentz Jr., an architect and beer vendor, for “balls, receptions, Hebrew weddings and sociables,” according to a December 1886 article in The New York Times.

But it soon came to be known for rowdy parties, many of which featured live music, like the fund-raiser for General Grant’s memorial in September 1887, or the fete for the French Revolution centennial in May 1889.

In the early 1900s, Webster Hall’s guest lists featured artists of all sorts, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Around the same time, Greenwich Village became a center of gay and lesbian life, and the club was frequently a gathering place.

And some of its music history...

It was back in 1953, when RCA Victor set up a studio in the Grand Ballroom of Webster Hall in Manhattan to achieve a level of reverberation that would help the label compete with Columbia Records. Perry Como recorded his “Como Swings” there in 1959, which displayed Como in slacks and a blue shirt on a golf course.

As the world changed, and music with it, so did the acts the venue attracted: in 1967, Jefferson Airplane staged its first concert in New York inside. On Dec. 6, 1980, U2ushered in the post-punk era here — it was called the Ritz at the time — when it pounded out “I Will Follow” in its first gig in the United States. And on Feb. 2, 1988, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses, standing on the same stage, before screeching “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” inflated a condom like a balloon.

No mention of K-Fed's show there, though...

Instant Bowery

From the Times. Check out Concrete Jumble: Instant Bowery, which is the third episode in Gary Leib's series of animations about the history of New York City.

Then/Now: UWS

The latest entry in David Dunlap's Then/Now series in the Times take us to the Upper West Side, Broadway between 74th and 75th. In comparing photos of that block from 1978 to today, Dunlap notes: "The time traveler recognizes Fairway and Citarella, of course, but the crowd looks younger, more prosperous and less diverse, and there are more children underfoot."

Gee, so much has changed in the last 12 years...

For the post I did earlier on Hop Devil Grill closing, I Iooked around for information on that space's former tenant, Stingy Lulu's. I came across this article in the July 6, 1996, Times that's worth highlighting:

Not long ago, Avenue A was a drug-infested no man's land, a forlorn strip given over to vagrants, anarchists and punks. At least that's how Karazona Cinar, 30, a local entrepreneur, remembers it. "Because of businessmen like me, things are much better," said Mr. Cinar, a Kurdish immigrant who owns Stingy Lulu's, a restaurant on St. Marks Place off Avenue A, and Robots, a bar on Avenue B.

Krystyna Piorkowska has different memories of Avenue A. Ms. Piorkowska, 47, who has lived in the neighborhood for 22 years, laments the loss of beloved merchants like the kosher butcher, the cobbler and the pirogi maker, all of them driven out by the forces of gentrification. To her dismay, the old mom-and-pop stores have been supplanted by nightclubs and bars, businesses that can afford the avenue's pumped-up rents. In her view, Avenue A has become a place for unbridled carousing, where bar-hopping youths keep residents awake until dawn and where broken glass and the stench of urine greet early risers. "Avenue A has become the East Village theme park," she said last week, standing amid a late-night crush of thrill-seekers. "It's now a place where you come to get drunk and see tattooed girls with spiked hair."

By the way, all the places mentioned in the article -- Stingy Lulu's, Robots, Arca and Nation -- have since closed.

And I also feel as if I've read variations of this article about 300 times in the last 12 years...

From a gilded age to a great emptiness...

An excerpt from Judith Warner's "Waiting for Schadenfreude" column in the Times today:

For those of us who have hated this period — the wealth worship, the wealth gap, the elevation of everything suspiciously shiny and irrationally bubbly and stupidly ebullient, there should be some feeling of vindication. But it just isn’t coming. A great emptiness — and a gnawing kind of fear — has taken its place.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

That article from the Times on becoming New Yorkers

There was a lot of reader feedback to Cara Buckley's article in the Times from Tuesday on "the sometimes painful adjustments faced by newcomers to New York City."

As she reports in the City Room, "scores of people, it seems, were reminded anew of the growing pains, and delight, that often go hand in hand with moving to the city. Readers’ comments ran the gamut, from lonely newcomers who still felt lost to people who remembered their early days here with great tenderness."

"A few native New Yorkers insisted that it was the arrivistes, rather than people born in the city, that acted standoffish and brusque, and gave the city its reputation for being rude."

Dennis Kelly, who grew up in Long Island and works in Queens, wrote:
As someone who regularly holds doors open for other people, and who is born and raised in New York I find that the rudest “New Yorkers” are younger professionals transplanted from other places that are trying a little too hard to be “real” New Yorkers. Everyone knows the stereotype from movies, and they try to live it. Their only guides along this path are other transplants who have “made it” because they have that “real” New Yorker attitude. Your article only managed to further entrench this stereotyping. Rude is not the new black. It never has been.